IBM's Watson Jeopardy supercomputer beats humans in practice - Jan. 13, 2011 Print Watson, IBM's natural-language processing supercomputer, is surprisingly cute and anthropomorphized. "He" appears as a black rectangle with a globe avatar sitting between his future rivals, Jeopardy champs Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, who also came to Yorktown Heights for the practice bout. The Jeopardy categories appear across the screen. The round includes "A man, a plan, a canal...Erie!" and "Chicks dig me." Jennings quips, "I've never said this on TV -- 'Chicks dig me' for $300.'" The audience laughs -- and then roars when Watson later intones, "Let's finish up 'Chicks dig me.'" 0:00 /1:52 Supercomputer 1, Jeopardy champs 0 Watson doesn't answer any questions incorrectly, but the machine stays silent throughout the "Children's Books" category, which Jennings sweeps. The whole setup is wonderfully cute and a ton of fun, but there's a lot of advanced tech going on here. IBM says Watson could have deep implications for practical situations.

Inside Watson's heart, soul and hardware: Watson, which takes its name from the surname of IBM founder Thomas J., is a computing system that aims to "understand" language as humans naturally speak it. That's no easy feat for a computer. Human language is full of subtleties, irony and words with multiple meanings. IBM has been working on the project for several years . To do this, Watson's researchers loaded their machine with 200 million pages of text. Watson uses that data to analyze contextual clues and figure out how words relate to each other. Take the Jeopardy example. Watson processes the questions by considering many factors, ranging from straightforward keyword matching to more complex challenges like homonyms (the bark of a tree is not the same as a dog's bark) and statistical paraphrasing ("Big Blue" is the same thing as "IBM"). Play the Fortune 500 Jeopardy game Watson runs through its databases to come up with an answer, and it will only "buzz in" if it reaches a set threshold of certainty. That's a massive number of tasks occurring at the same time.

But Watson is able to do this quickly thanks to software that runs on a 10 refrigerator-sized racks of IBM Power7 systems. The machine is a grandkid to Deep Blue, the chess-playing IBM supercomputer that trounced world champion Garry Kasparov in 1997. Practical applications: IBM researchers say they avoided merely loading Watson up with countless databases because they want the technology to work for any person or company looking for quick answers. David Ferrucci, IBM's lead researcher on Watson, said in a question-and-answer session that the company sees huge potential in the health care area. Watson could help doctors more accurately diagnose patients, he suggested. Other business applications include online self-service help desks, tourist information centers, customer hotlines and more, IBM says. So who won the "Jeopardy!" practice run?! Watson won! Too bad, humans! In a 15-question round, Watson fielded about half of the questions -- and got none wrong. The computer netted $4,400, nearly quadrupling Rutter's score and beating Jennings by $1,000. Jennings and Rutter also sported a perfect track record on their answers.

The final margin seemed to come down to who could buzz in the fastest. The real competition will be a series of matches that will air on television on February 14, 15 and 16. First place wins a cool million, second place takes home $300,000 and third place nets $200,000. IBM ( IBM , Fortune 500 ) will donate 100% of Watson's winnings to charity, while Rutter and Jennings each said they will donate 50% of their prizes. Google+ Most stock quote data provided by BATS. Market indices are shown in real time, except for the DJIA, which is delayed by two minutes. All times are ET. Disclaimer . Morningstar: Â© 2016 Morningstar, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Factset: FactSet Research Systems Inc. 2016. All rights reserved. Chicago Mercantile Association: Certain market data is the property of Chicago Mercantile Exchange Inc. and its licensors. All rights reserved.

Dow Jones: The Dow Jones branded indices are proprietary to and are calculated, distributed and marketed by DJI Opco, a subsidiary of S&P Dow Jones Indices LLC and have been licensed for use to S&P Opco, LLC and CNN. Standard & Poor's and S&P are registered trademarks of Standard & Poorâs Financial Services LLC and Dow Jones is a registered trademark of Dow Jones Trademark Holdings LLC. All content of the Dow Jones branded indices © S&P Dow Jones Indices LLC 2016 and/or its affiliates. © 2016 Cable News Network. A Time Warner Company. All Rights Reserved. Terms under which this service is provided to you. Privacy Policy . . IBM's Watson Computer, Human Tied After Round One of 'Jeopardy!' Match-Up - ABC News Email Can man hold his own against machine? So far, he seems to be doing just fine. Monday night, all-time "Jeopardy!" champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter faced off against IBM's super computer Watson in the first round of a three-day "Jeopardy!" challenge.

The score so far: Brad Rutter and Watson tied in first place with $5,000 each; Ken Jennings stuck in third with $2,000. Although Watson made a strong showing in the beginning, it stumbled later in the contest with the more complex questions. When asked for the decade in which Oreos were introduced, Watson incorrectly answered: "What is the 1920s?" after Jennings already provided the same incorrect response. Later, Watson flubbed again when host Alex Trebek offered the clue: "Stylish elegance, or students who all graduated in the same year." The computer replied: "What is chic?" But the correct answer, provided by Rutter, was: "What is class?" For the past four years, top artificial intelligence researchers at IBM have been preparing their mega-machine, Watson, to compete on "Jeopardy!" against all-time champions Jennings and Rutter. The much-hyped three-day matchup between man and machine , which was taped in January, aired on national television for the first time Monday night and continues until Wednesday. Watson Plays at a Very High Level, Jennings Said In an interview with ABCNews.com last week, Jennings said the pressure is on.

"One of the first things I thought was, 'This time, I'm not just playing to pay my mortgage or something, or to feed my kid's college fund, I'm actually sort of representing 7 billion human beings against our new machine tyrants,'" he quipped. "That was a lot of responsibility. I didn't want to let people down." When "Jeopardy!" first called him a couple of years ago to let him know that IBM was working on a supreme game-show machine, Jennings said he was "skeptical." As a former computer programmer himself, he said, he knew the computer's limitations and doubted if IBM actually could pull it off. But when he watched taped matches of Watson playing against top human contestants, he realized that beating the computer was hardly a foregone conclusion. "Clearly, it was playing at a very high level. It sort of effortlessly handled the kinds of things I thought computers couldn't do," he said.

"It could understand wordplay, it could understand things that were more conceptual than a single fact." But when the machine gets something wrong, Jennings said, "it gets it spectacularly wrong." For example, Jennings said an IBM developer told him that when asked for the Russian word for "goodbye," Watson gave the answer "cholesterol." "To me, that's just crazy," he said. "There's no way a human player could duplicate that kind of mistake, but Watson has no idea. It just doesn't have all the checks and balances we do." Rutter: Humanity Wins Even If Man Loses Still, Rutter said, despite its mistakes, Watson is a very powerful computer. "I think humans will be surprised," he told ABCNews.com. "Especially because it's just "Jeopardy!" clues like you see every day on the show. To see a computer actually figuring it out, with all the little twists and turns and puns that they like to get in there, even factoring those in.

To see how well Watson is doing, I think might scare some people." Potentially anticipating the sci-fi-fueled "eventual robot takeover of society," Rutter said IBM has been emphasizing that Watson is an "it" and not a "he." "I think they sense that people will get freaked out by how well it's doing and how well it can approximate a human," he said. But regardless of whether Rutter, Jennings or Watson wins the match, Rutter said, no one really loses. "Ken and I are representing humanity in this thing but, at the same time, Watson was developed, built, programmed by human beings," said Rutter. "So I think humanity wins no matter what happens." And beyond even that, Jennings said that playing the world's most sophisticated computer gave him a new appreciation for the humble human brain. "I was impressed at the end that the human brain -- just a few dollars worth of water and salt and protein and whatever else we have in our skulls -- that that could hang in there and play at the same level as this jillion-dollar computer the size of a room," he said. "It says a lot for the human brain that with what we have we can hang with the world's most powerful computer.

It's sort of a newfound respect for what our heads can do, which we take for granted sometimes." The Associated Press contributed to the report. 0 Shares Watson plays 'Jeopardy!' well, but what else can it do? - USATODAY.com Watson plays 'Jeopardy!' well, but what else can it do? By Dan Vergano, USA TODAY Updated By Carol Kaelson, Jeopardy Productions, via AP Watson won decisively after three days against Ken Jennings, left, and Brad Rutter on Jeopardy! By Carol Kaelson, Jeopardy Productions, via AP Watson won decisively after three days against Ken Jennings, left, and Brad Rutter on Jeopardy! Watson, the IBM computer created to be a champ-challenging contestant on Jeopardy !, chewed up and spat out humanity's finest knights of trivia Wednesday night in a $77,147 drubbing of past record winners Ken Jennings ($24,000 total) and Brad Rutter ($21,600). "I sort of felt like I wanted to win here as badly as I ever have before.

This is like the dignity of the species," Jennings told CBS Evening News after the first night's show. So has the fatal day of reckoning arrived, foretold by Frankenstein, 2001: A Space Odyssey and, of course, The Terminator series of man-vs.-machine movies? Even trivia, one of humanity's favorite pursuits, has yielded to the mighty computer. What is "not so much"?, Alex. "It is clear (Watson) was designed to play Jeopardy! very well," says computer intelligence expert John Laird of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor , both in its vast erudition — answering Saturday Night Live 's "Church Lady" in one question — and its "impressive" accuracy. But, he adds, "I think IBM could have a challenge to move this to other fields." IBM is trying. Last week, the Armonk, N.Y.-based computer-services titan announced partnerships with eight universities, including MIT and the University of Texas, to explore new uses of Watson's "Deep Question" technology. The process lets Watson sift through and weigh its confidence in answers to complex questions.

IBM's David Ferrucci says the company sees future uses for Watson in automating questions for health care and legal aid. IBM also Thursday announced a research partnership with Nuance Communications Inc. of Burlington, Maine, maker of the popular Dragon speech recognition software, to develop a physician's assistant technology based on Watson. Within a year, they hope to test mobile devices equipped with a medical knowledge version of Watson to help with diagnoses and treatment recommendations as physicians make rounds in hospitals connected to medical schools at Columbia University and the University of Maryland. "This is not about games," says IBM research executive John Kelly. "We want to apply this technology to benefit medicine in a way that really matters." Computer vs. brain Feeling a little computer envy? Don't let IBM's Watson, the champ-crushing computer on Jeopardy!, get you down. A comparison with your own human brain: Sources: IBM, USC, Scientific American Graphic by Frank Pompa, USA TODAY But even amid Watson's triumph, some answers it blew point to problems, say experts such as machine-learning pioneer Douglas Lenat of Cycorp in Austin. "Like a human idiot savant, it would get wrong a large fraction of things that almost all sane adult humans would get right," Lenat says.

"For instance, if the category were 'Uphill vs. Downhill,' and the clue was 'The direction that beer flows.' " (Watson doesn't understand gravity as a concept, and few documents it searches are likely to discuss the propensity of beer to flow downhill.) Then there was the "Final Jeopardy" question Tuesday in the "U.S. cities" category, answering which city had airports named for both a World War II hero and battle. Watson chose "Toronto???" instead of Chicago (O'Hare and Midway). Ferrucci defends Watson by saying it answered this way with only 14% confidence because it had to. "Just because a Jeopardy! category says 'U.S. cities' does NOT mean the answer is (actually the name of) a U.S. city," Ferrucci says by e-mail. Building off decades of artificial-intelligence research, Watson pursues one well-trod path — broadly analyzing vast libraries of text for answers — rather than relying on deep structural knowledge of a very narrow area, such as lunar geology, seen in so-called "expert" systems, says Ellen Voorhees of the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Gaithersburg, Md.

Who is best at the buzzer? Some question whether Watson enjoys an unfair buzzer-beating advantage over its human opponents on Jeopardy!. On the show, a question is displayed and host Alex Trebek reads the question aloud. Only when he stops can contestants buzz in to give their answer. So does Watson have an advantage in having the text of the question delivered the same instant that human players can see the question? "Oddly enough, humans have an advantage because they can anticipate when the buzzers are enabled by listening to the clue and timing it," says IBMï¿½s David Ferrucci. In contrast, Watson uses an? algorithm to guess when it is safe to buzz, he says, costing time. But people often mis-anticipate Trebekï¿½s timing, "pre-buzzing," which locks them out for 0.25 seconds, long enough to lose. "It is a significant advance," she says, but it doesn't have both the broad search and deep knowledge of an ideal system. "Compared to a human brain, Watson doesn't even come close in computational power," says information scholar Martin Hilbert of the University of Southern California .

"If only we put as much effort in educating human brains as we spent on computers." Watson required the work of more than 20 researchers over four years to develop. Anxiety about Watson says more about people than computers, says Andrew Meltzoff of the University of Washington in Seattle, an expert on robot-human interaction. "To us, potentially losing to a computer raises issues of 'Who am I? What does it mean to be human?' " he says. "The Jeopardy! event is hype for humans. The computer doesn't care. The debate is a clue to what makes us human." For more information about reprints & permissions , visit our FAQ's. To report corrections and clarifications, contact Standards Editor Brent Jones. For publication consideration in the newspaper, send comments to letters@usatoday.com . Include name, phone number, city and state for verification. To view our corrections, go to corrections.usatoday.com . Posted Jeopardy! champ says Democratic senators asked him to run for office – CNN Political Ticker - CNN.com Blogs CNN's Alison Harding (CNN) - "Jeopardy!" champion Ken Jennings revealed during a online question and answer session last week that two prominent senators tried to recruit him to run for a U.S.

Senate seat in 2004. "Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and Harry Reid (D-NV) both called me back personally in 2004 to try to get me to run for Orrin Hatch's Senate seat," Jennings wrote in response to a question about what types of job offers he's gotten since famously winning 74 straight games of Jeopardy!. "I am not making this up. Win on a game show and you can apparently run for the US Senate. That was when I realized the Democratic Party was f@#$ed in '04," he added. Jennings would have faced a tough race against Hatch, who had no primary challengers and easily won reelection with 63 percent of the vote in the 2006 race. Though Jennings still doesn't seem interested in a Senate bid, Hatch will likely have a tougher race this time around. Many political observers predict that the longtime senator could face a strong primary challenge from a conservative candidate when he is up for reelection again in 2012.

Jennings was fielding questions on the social news site Reddit under the handle "Watson's B–tch," a reference to IBM's new supercomputer, nicknamed Watson, that recently bested Jennings and fellow "Jeopardy!" champion Brad Rutter in a special two-game match-up. But unlike Jennings, Watson has not shied from the political spotlight. The supercomputer most recently faced off against group of congressmen in Washington during an informal game of "Jeopardy!" set up by IBM to teach members of Congress about the new technology. Watson predictably won the game, but proved no match for Democratic Rep. Rush Holt. The New Jersey congressman, an actual five-time "Jeopardy!" champion, managed to overcome the computer during his round, much to Jenning's apparent dismay. When asked if he knew how the congressman did it, Jennings wrote "Rush Holt! I will never stop doing this now. I hope I never meet the guy..." Behind-the-scenes with IBM's 'Jeopardy!' computer, Watson - CNN.com Behind-the-scenes with IBM's 'Jeopardy!' computer, Watson By John D.

Sutter, CNN | Filed under: Innovation IBM held a practice round for its Watson computer, which will compete against people in an upcoming "Jeopardy!" episode. STORY HIGHLIGHTS IBM's Watson computer will compete on "Jeopardy!" February 14 to 16 CNN talks with the author of "Final Jeopardy," a book about the computer Watson can be slow on tasks easy for humans while blazing past people on others (CNN) -- His name is Watson. He's bad with puns. Great at math. And, next week, he will compete on the game show "Jeopardy!" against real, live, breathing, thinking humans. Smart ones, too. The "Watson" IBM computer, which has been in development for four years, will be matched against Brad Rutter and Ken Jennings, two of Jeopardy's champions. The episodes are scheduled to be aired February 14 to 16. Watson beat Jennings and Rutter in a practice round last month, during which the computer fielded about half the questions and gave all correct answers.

To learn more about this man-versus-machine showdown, CNN spoke with author Stephen Baker , who's followed Watson's development and has an upcoming book, "Final Jeopardy," about what this question-answering computer means for the future of technology. The following is an edited transcript: CNN: In learning about Watson, what surprised you the most? Baker: I guess what surprised me the most was Watson's speed, because, when it started out, Watson took two hours to answer a "Jeopardy!" question, often incorrectly, and by the end they got it down to two to three seconds. You have to see this thing. What does it look like? Well the body of Watson, which is not on camera, is like 10 huge refrigerators, in an air-conditioned room. And then they've got this avatar, that is between Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, that looks like a black computer screen with a revolving globe on it -- an orb. And then it has these lines -- they're supposed to sort of represent cognitive processes. Swirling images and things. So it's a bit deceiving -- what you see on TV? Yeah. It's just a simulation of cognition. Really it's just a big computer.

As I say in my book, the avatar is a close cousin of the screen saver. Can you compare Watson to the machines we use every day, like a standard laptop? Watson has the power of a couple thousand laptops working together. And in terms of sophistication, it's a program that understands complex English -- or works mightily to understand complex English. And we don't have that in our laptop. What we have is Google. And with Google we work really hard to help Google understand what we're trying to communicate -- the two or three words we hope the computer will understand. Has it been able to accomplish something new with language cognition that other computers haven't? Or what's fundamentally new? As recently as four years ago, machines, in question answering, tried to take fairly complex questions that are similar to Jeopardy's and they got about 30% of them right, so they really couldn't do a job that was anywhere close to a human. Now Watson gets eight or nine out of 10 of the Jeopardy answers it tried correct. So it's just a huge improvement in getting a machine to answer questions. On a technical level, what did IBM do to accomplish that?

Instead of just trying one approach, saying 'We're going to do it statistically' or 'We're going to teach the computer a million different rules about the world,' IBM just tried a very pragmatic approach, which said that if there's anything that works, we're going to include it in this. So they've got hundreds of different algorithms all trying a different approach to understanding the clue and trying to figure out the answer. And then it's up to the computer to look at thousands of different candidate answers and pick out the one that's most likely to be right. So it's kind of a throw-it-all-in-the-kitchen-sink approach? Definitely, because the one thing they have is massive computer power, so they can throw massive computing power at it. If I give you a math problem, you basically send it to the part of your brain that deals with math. If they give Watson a math problem, every one of these algorithms -- the ones that deal with poetry, the ones that deal with synonyms, the ones that deal with search -- they all go working on it. And many of them bring back ridiculous answers.

But they don't care, because if the math algorithm brings back the right answer, they can decide on that and throw out the rest. So it's very wasteful. Are there certain things it doesn't understand? It has a harder time when it has to figure out multiple things in a question. For example, there's a type of "Jeopardy!" question that says, like "Do the math: _____ blind mice, times ___ Commandments equals this." So you have to say, 'OK, that's three blind mice, times Ten Commandments, so that's 30." That would be a lot of work for Watson. If there's a lot of puns -- it has trouble with puns. Language is so hard for it. It struggles with basic language, even like what you and I are talking about. And if they try and trip it up, they can succeed. What does this tell you about the future of computing? Supercomputer beats 'Jeopardy!' players Ken Jennings (Computers will be able to) understand us much better, not only when we're asking them questions but also when they're searching through all the words that we produce in e-mails and blogs and all the rest, and learn about the world.

Machines like this are going to be able to go through all the data that we're creating and search for answers. Not like Google, which is searching for documents we might find interesting, but putting it together. Do you see this as a machines versus humans moment? That's kind of a contrivance because it makes for good TV. And it shows how far the machine has come, which is really impressive. But in the workplace, there's no sense in letting a machine work so hard to try to understand puns and things like that. People can do that. And they can benefit from what the machine does best, which is find stuff in massive troves of data -- find answers. Some people might look at this and be fearful -- as they see a computer that's getting smarter and smarter. Is there any part of you that's afraid of Watson? I think there's a concern for jobs that this type of computer is going to take away, because if you have a job that's based on understanding English and then searching for answers, if you work at a telephone help line for example, this type of machine is going to elbow you out pretty soon. It raises really serious questions about education and what we have to learn to make ourselves indispensable.

Why did they name it Watson? It's the name of the founder of IBM, Thomas J. Watson. But it also is the Sherlock Holmes' No. 2., Dr. Watson. And it doesn't sound as threatening because people associate Watson as not the most intelligent guy in the world. What's in this for IBM? IBM does these challenges to advance computing and also to blow its own horn. And IBM has to compete for investment dollars and for brain power with other companies that are viewed as sexier, companies like Apple, Google, Facebook. And they want to let the brightest PhDs at places like MIT and Stanford know that IBM is a place to do really cool stuff. And they have this huge services division, which is their biggest division, and they want to use this technology to sell to their clients. They've done this kind of demo before, right? They were behind the chess computer, Deep Blue . And they also did Blue Gene , which was the fastest supercomputer at the time -- developed to decode the human genome. Do you think Watson will win? I know the result. I've written my last chapter already and it's being added to the book right now, so I can't say.

But before the match I had some comments about why Watson, some said, had an advantage ... because it was one computer against two humans. Both of them would rather have had one human against two computers. Two computers would fight over the same sorts of computer specialty questions. When was it taped? The 14th of January. What's an example of a question Watson would be really good at? The thing it just really eats for breakfast is: Give me a 14-letter word, ending in -le, that means whatever. Or take these 17 letters, what common nursery do they spell. So it just uses its computer smarts to do those sorts of searches very quickly. One area its very weak in against good humans is if the clue is short. If the clue is only a single name then ("Jeopardy!" host) Alex Trebek reads the clue, it takes him maybe only a half a second to read it, and Watson needs more time than that to search for it.

So if you have a clue that says something like, the category is "first ladies," and the clue is "Ronald Reagan." Watson would need two or three seconds to come up with that answer and a good human would know it in a heartbeat, so Watson would lose every one in that category. Is this competition fair? Is it more than just an ad? Oh it's a real competition. I saw Watson in practice sessions throughout 2010, and it lost one out of three games to humans who were much less skilled than these two, that it's facing. So you'll see that Watson has enormous vulnerabilities. Share this on: IBM’s Watson Supercomputer Wins Practice Jeopardy Round | WIRED Time of Publication: 12:50 pm. 12:50 pm IBM’s Watson Supercomputer Wins Practice Jeopardy Round Jeopardy champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter square off against IBM's Watson supercomputer on Thursday in Yorktown Heights, NY. Photo by Sam Gustin/Wired.com YORKTOWN HEIGHTS, NY – It’s man vs. machine — for real.

IBM’s celebrated supercomputer Watson will square off against Jeopardy champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter in a first-of-its-kind competition to be aired over three nights in February. The grand prize is $1 million; second place wins $300,000; third place receives $200,000. Jennings and Rutter have pledged 50 percent of their winnings to charity; IBM will donate all of its prize. During a demonstration round Thursday, Watson handily defeated the two Jeopardy champions. The IBM Jeopardy Challenge represents a milestone in the development of artificial intelligence , and is part of Big Blue’s centennial celebration. “We are at a very special moment in time,” said Dr. John E. Kelly III, IBM Senior Vice President and Director of IBM Research. “We are at a moment where computers and computer technology now have approached humans. We have created a computer system that has the ability to understand natural human language, which is a very difficult thing for computers to do.” Named after IBM founder Thomas J. Watson, the supercomputer is one of the most advanced systems on Earth and was programmed by 25 IBM scientists over the last four years.

Researchers scanned some 200 million pages of content — or the equivalent of about one million books — into the system, including books, movie scripts and entire encyclopedias. Watson is not your run-of-the-mill computer. The system is powered by 10 racks of IBM POWER 750 servers running Linux, and uses 15 terabytes of RAM, 2,880 processor cores and can operate at 80 teraflops. That’s 80 trillion operations per second. Watson scans the 2 million pages of content in its “brain” in less than three seconds. The system is not connected to the internet, but totally self-contained. The machine is the size of 10 refrigerators. Watson. Photo by Sam Gustin/Wired.com “This is the culmination of four years of hard work and we didn’t know that we’d get here,” said David A. Ferrucci, the principal investigator for IBM’s Watson project. Watson follows Deep Blue, the IBM supercomputer that ultimately defeated chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov in 1997.

Kelly said the lessons IBM learned from developing Watson would be applicable across industries, including law, business, and especially medicine. “Watson can read all of the health-care texts in the world in seconds,” Kelly said. “And that’s our first priority, creating a Dr. Watson, if you will.” “Imagine if a doctor in Africa could access all of the world’s medical texts from the cloud, in seconds, to learn about potential drug interactions,” he added. During a press conference Thursday morning at IBM Research headquarters in Yorktown Heights, New York, the company showcased Watson and held a practice Jeopardy round between the supercomputer, Jennings, who won over $2.5 million on a 74-game run in 2004-2005, and Rutter, the all-time money leader at $3,255,102. The scene was slightly surreal. Watson “stood” in between the two champions, its “avatar” — which the company describes as “a global map projection with a halo of ‘thought rays'” — flickering and flashing, as if it was thinking.

“The threads and thought rays that make up Watson’s avatar change color and speed depending on what happens during the game,” according to Watson’s official “bio.” “For example, when Watson feels confident in an answer the rays on the avatar turn green; they turn orange when Watson gets the answer wrong. Viewers will see the avatar speed up and activate when Watson’s algorithms are working hard to answer a clue.” Watson jumped out to an early lead. For the first four questions of the round, the supercomputer “read” the clue, “pressed” its buzzer, and provided the correct answer. Its human opponents tried valiantly to catch up, but the end of the round, Watson was in first place with $4,400. Jennings was second, with $3,400. Rutter was third, with $1,200. None of the three contestants appeared rattled. Of course, Watson lacks the capacity to get rattled. “Watson doesn’t have any emotions, but it knows that humans do,” Ferrucci said.

Asked if he was nervous to be competing against a computer, Rutter quipped, “Not nervous, but I will be when Watson’s progeny comes back from the future to kill me .” The score after one round. Photo by Sam Gustin/Wired.com Thursday’s round was just a demonstration. Watson will go head-to-head with Jennings and Rutter in two matches, to be aired February 14, 15, and 16. Follow us for disruptive tech news: Sam Gustin and Epicenter on Twitter. Photos: Sam Gustin/Wired.com Brad Rutter (Contestant) - Pics, Videos, Dating, & News Brad Rutter Male Born Jan 31, 1978 Bradford Gates "Brad" Rutter is the biggest all-time money winner on the U.S. syndicated game show Jeopardy! and the second biggest all-time money winner on a game show. Rutter became an undefeated champion on Jeopardy! in 2000 and subsequently won an unprecedented three Jeopardy!

tournament titles: the 2001 Tournament of Champions, the Million Dollar Masters Tournament, and the Ultimate Tournament of Champions.… Read More related links Ibm Watson Head Mike Rhodin On The Future Of Artificial Intelligence Forbes - Jan 18, 2016 'Perhaps nothing signaled the arrival of artificial intelligence quite like January 14, 2011, when IBM Watson defeated two legendary Jeopardy! champions, Ken Jennings and <mark>Brad Rutter</mark>. At last, the computers were smarter than us. Since then, Watson has developed into a growth engine for IBM. For just over two years, Michael [...]' Ibm's Watson Vs. 'jeopardy!' Champs Shows Will Be Rebroadcast Next Week News Sentinel Google News - Sep 06, 2011 'announced today the game show will offer a broadcast encore of the first man vs. machine matches between IBM&#39;s âWatsonâ computing system and the show&#39;s two greatest contestants -- Ken Jennings and <mark>Brad Rutter</mark>.

The episodes will air Monday through' Getting A Computer To Play Jeopardy Bloomberg - Businessweek - Sep 02, 2011 'In February, Jeopardy champions Ken Jennings and <mark>Brad Rutter</mark> faced off against IBM\'s computer, Watson. The battle was man vs. Machine, and millions of people tuned in to see just how smart computers had become.' Don't Text While Driving But What About Asking Watson? Zd Net Google News - Aug 30, 2011 'Champions Ken Jennings and <mark>Brad Rutter</mark>. This revolutionary technology could serve as the foundation of a system encouraging safer driving practices. Imagine if rather than texting questions while en route, drivers could talk to Watson, almost like an' Learn about the memorable moments in the evolution of Brad Rutter. CHILDHOOD 1978 Birth Born on January 31, 1978. TEENAGE 1995 17 Years Old Rutter is a 1995 graduate of Manheim Township High School in Neffsville, Pennsylvania, where he was on the quiz bowl team.

… Read More He is one of the 19 people to have been named to the National Academic Championship Hall of Fame in its 25-year history. Read Less TWENTIES 2000 22 Years Old Rutter first appeared on Jeopardy! in October 2000, when the rules stipulated that a contestant who won five consecutive days retired undefeated and was guaranteed a spot in the Tournament of Champions. … Read More Rutter retired as an undefeated 5-day champion, with $55,102 in winnings (he was also awarded a choice of Chevrolet cars of which he picked 2 Chevrolet Camaros; at the time, Jeopardy awarded new cars to 5-day undefeated champions). The rules would be changed in 2003, before Ken Jennings' run of 74 consecutive days in 2004, making Jennings the (then) all-time Jeopardy! money winner. Read Less 2001 23 Years Old As a 5-day champion, Rutter was invited to the 2001 Tournament of Champions, where he defeated other 5-day champions and won the $100,000 main prize.

2002 24 Years Old He was invited back for the 2002 Million Dollar Masters Tournament, where he won the $1,000,000 main prize and became the all-time money winner in Jeopardy! history. Show Less At the 2005 Manheim Township High School graduation ceremony, he announced the start of a scholarship fund in memory of his late high-school quiz bowl coach, Miss Ann Clouser. … Read More Rutter has described himself as a "slacker" in school and a Johns Hopkins dropout (while there, he studied English). Before his success on Jeopardy!, he worked at the Lancaster Coconuts record store. Read Less Rutter returned for the 2005 Ultimate Tournament of Champions, winning the tournament and $2,100,000. After his 2005 tournament win, in which he defeated Jennings and Jerome Vered in the finals, Rutter surpassed Jennings as the highest money-winner ever on American game shows. … Read More Jennings later regained his record by 2008 after appearing on various other game shows. There is a minor discrepancy between sources as to Rutter's total Jeopardy!

winnings stemming from the prize structure of the Ultimate Tournament of Champions. Those who won the first round earned $15,000, but Rutter was among nine top winners who received a first round bye. While some analysts suggest that Rutter's money totals should include $15,000 for a first round 'win' in this tournament, the official Jeopardy.com website does not count this $15,000 when stating that Rutter's winnings were $3,255,102 after the completion of this tournament.<br /><br /> From February 14â16, 2011, the Jeopardy! IBM Challenge featured IBM's Watson facing off against Rutter and Jennings in a two-game cumulative total match aired over three days. This was the first ever man-versus-machine competition in Jeopardy!'s history. The computer program, equipped with a precisely timed mechanical "thumb", won handily, finishing with a $77,147 score, while Jennings took second place with a score of $24,000 over Rutter's $21,600 score. IBM donated its $1 million purse to two charities.

Jennings and Rutter did likewise with half of their respective winnings of $300,000 and $200,000. Rutter kept $100,000 and donated the other $100,000 to the Lancaster County Community Foundation. Read Less 2006 28 Years Old He appeared on the U.S. game show 1 vs. 100 (as a member of "the Mob") on December 1, 2006, and again on December 8, 2006. … Read More He answered every question correctly and was one of only seven mob members to survive to the next show, as was Annie Duke. He would eventually be eliminated on the December 15 episode, on a question about Jewish reggae musician Matisyahu. Read Less 2007 29 Years Old He appeared again on February 9, 2007, and was eliminated late into a winner-takes-$250,000 "last man standing" competition, but before Ken Jennings.

… Read More Rutter was the top seed in Grand Slam, but lost in the second round to Ogi Ogas, a former Who Wants to Be a Millionaire contestant. Read Less THIRTIES 2010 32 Years Old Rutter competed in the 2010 World Quizzing Championship, where he finished 140th. … Read More He was also a contestant on the 6th episode of Million Dollar Mind Game (aired on November 27, 2011), where his team won $600,000. Read Less 2012 34 Years Old In May 2012, he did a pilot episode as a "Chaser" for the American version of the British game show The Chase. … Read More Fox network ordered two pilots for consideration in its lineup. The Chaser in the other pilot was Mark Labbett, who is one of the five Chasers on both the British and Australian versions of the show.

Despite the show not being picked up by Fox, it was later picked by GSN, with Labbett as the only Chaser.<br /><br /> Rutter subsequently moved to southern California to pursue a career as an actor and TV host. Read Less IBM's Watson Computer Will Win on Jeopardy. I Know. I Played Against It. IBM's Watson Computer Will Win on Jeopardy. I Know. I Played Against It. {{article.article.images.featured.caption}} Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own. Full Bio The author is a Forbes contributor. The opinions expressed are those of the writer. Loading ... Loading ... This story appears in the {{article.article.magazine.pretty_date}} issue of {{article.article.magazine.pubName}}. Subscribe The author, unaware he was preparing to meet his doom at IBM Research in Hawthorne, N.Y. Today's the big day. IBM's Jeopardy!-playing supercomputer Watson plays the first of three nights against the game's two greatest champions, Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, on ABC at 7 p.m. Eastern. The winner gets $1 million.

The victory will decide once and for all whether a sizable computer can deracinate humans from a game only they (well, Merv Griffin) could invent. How do I know Watson will win? Because I played two rounds against the "world's smartest machine" last week and lost badly. The other human contestant was A.J., a private-equity megamind with a tweed blazer and multiple degrees from Ivy League institutions. Him I could handle. Watson, though, was OFF-THE-HOOK good. It claimed more than $30,000 in winnings each time. IBM said I was the only writer to have played against the machine. Ego-wise, a bittersweet scoop. Sony Pictures Entertainment, which owns Jeopardy!, had better attend here. The last stunt like this was when another IBM supercomputer called Deep Blue beat Russian grandmaster Garry Kasparov at chess. Has anyone talked about chess since then? In fact Kasparov has been going around criticizing computers for not being smart enough. Well, tovarisch, tonight a new era of computing begins. The Trebek era is drawing to a close.

If you need a backgrounder on what Watson is and how it works, you can read this story , watch this video or listen to this NPR radio program . The press is all over this Jeopardy! Challenge, and rightfully so. Such holy-crap innovation from an American company is just what we need at a time when everyone is concerned about America falling behind China and its ilk. Jeopardy! may seem like a silly application for such an expensive effort by one of the world's largest technology companies, but IBM is testing a system that opens frontiers in software intelligence. Google is about search results. It's up to you to pluck the best result from the list. With Watson, you ask a question (a certain way) and you get a range of answers with the thought process behind each answer, the confidence level behind each answer and all the relevant links to the reference used to derive each answer. This is something new. There are many reasons Watson is good at Jeopardy!. It has something like a million pages of documents and a geospatial database in its memory. It can run the board on categories like "Northernmost Capital Cities," in which you're given a trio of capital cities and have to name the northernmost one.

Watson doesn't really "get" that the category is looking for geographical information off the bat. That isn't a simple assumption to deduce from the category syntax, but it catches on quickly that all it has to do is compare the latitude of each city in the trio and give the one with the highest number. It buzzes in correctly on Stockholm, Bogota, Pyongyang, Algiers and Kathmandu. A.J. and I knew some of these, but that's when Watson's other superior trait kicks in; the machine is lightning-fast at buzzing in answers. The best Jeopardy! champions get to the buzzer first more than 60% of the time. Watson can sometimes push that buzz-in rate above 70% and has improved its accuracy every few months until now it lives in the same scatterplot chart region of speed and accuracy as a Jeopardy! champion. Only Jennings' scatterplot looks better. But for mere mortals, if you can't get even a crack at one-third of the clues, what's the point of being there? Watson is really good at the bottom of the board, too, those $2,000 plums that often stump humans.

One was in the category "Saints Be Praised." The answer: "This New Testament martyr is the patron saint of bricklayers." Get it? I didn't think so. Watson did, answering "What is St. Stephen?" How the hell does it know that? Oh, I forgot, it has total recall of everything. I am a fairly good Jeopardy! player. I made the show once . I lost with a very big lead going into Final Jeopardy by getting it wrong. The same tragedy befell me in the second game against Watson. (The first game, drawn from this January episode , we will not talk about. Suffice to say they had to lend me money so I could finish.) In the second game, based on this October 2010 episode , I had $16,200 before Final Jeopardy! Watson had $31,800. AJ had $8,000. Statistically, I could have won if Watson got it wrong and I doubled my bet with a correct answer. The category was Mammals.

My mind riffled through the mammal files: Hair, milk, birth to live young, bats, whales, dolphins, chimps. Got it. I doubled my bet, minus a dollar. The clue: "One type of this aquatic animal gives milk that's 65% fat; pups are weaned in 4 days, the least of any mammal." Can a computer beat Ken Jennings at 'Jeopardy'? Can a computer beat Ken Jennings at 'Jeopardy'? The Week Staff In a practice round, the computer beat Ken Jennings - who won a record 74 Jeopardy! games in 2004 and 2005 - but the real test will come in February. Getty January 18, 2011 10 things you need to know today Today's best articles Today's top cartoons Daily business briefing An IBM super-computer is playing a series of "Jeopardy!" games against two of the quiz show's most famous champions, and the living, breathing contestants appear to be the underdogs in this battle between man and machine.

In a practice round last week, the computer — a super-powerful machine called Watson that was created by IBM scientists — edged out Ken Jennings, the most famous contestant in the show's history, and Brad Rutter, another luminary. Watson has been programmed to answer "Jeopardy" questions within three seconds. The official contests air in February. Do Watson's human opponents stand a chance? ( Watch the computer prevail in a trial round ) What is Watson? It's a super-powerful machine — 10 times the size of a refrigerator — that IBM developed over four years to commemorate the company's 100th anniversary. Named after IBM co-founder Thomas J. Watson, the machine, "combines natural language processing, machine learning and information retrieval " to scan the information in its "brain" and identify seemingly appropriate information. It does it all in a flash, performing a stunning 80 trillion operations a second, and assigns a percentage to express its level of confidence that the answer is correct. To make it a trivia master, IBM researchers " scanned some 200 million pages of content " — including books, movie scripts, and entire encyclopedias — into its memory banks.

Watson has drawn many comparisons to Deep Blue, another IBM supercomputer, which defeated chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov in a series of matches in 1997. How will the game work? Watson will square off against Jennings and Rutter in a series of three games, airing Feb. 14, 15, and 16. The winner will receive a $1 million dollar prize, the second-place finisher gets $300,000, and third place gets $200,000. (IBM has said it will donate any winnings to charity; Jennings and Rutter will also donate portions of their winnings.) Viewers will only see Watson as a computer monitor, and the machine will "will answer in a computer generated voice that is eerily reminiscent of HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey," says Ian Paul at PC World — while Jennings and Rutter try to keep up. Watson will not be connected to the internet during the game, to prove its effectiveness purely as a database. How did the practice game go?

At the IBM headquarters in Yorktown Heights, N.Y., Watson appeared at a press conference with Jennings, who became a "Jeopardy" legend by winning 74 contests in a row, and Rutter, who set a "Jeopardy" record with $3,255,102 in winnings. In a "slightly surreal" scene, says Sam Gustin at Wired , the three contestants played a quick practice round, with Watson sandwiched between the two human contestants. The computer was represented by a computer screen displaying its "avatar," which IBM describes as "a global map projection with a halo of 'thought rays.'" Watson answered the first four questions (in the category "Chicks Dig Me") to jump to an early lead, and at the end of round was ahead with $4,400 in winnings — Jennings was next with $3,400 and Rutter lagged behind with $1,200. Does Watson have any weakneses? Yes. Once in a while, Watson will "misinterpret the context of a given question and offer an answer that's so far off the mark it's humorous," says USA Today .

In an article about the system over the summer, The New York Times reported on Watson's limitations: "When the computer was asked to complete the phrase "Toto, I've a feeling we're not in Ka—," Watson offered “not in Kansas anymore,” which was incorrect, since the precise phrasing was simply "Kansas anymore," and "Jeopardy!" is strict about phrasing." During the practice round, says PC Magazine , the system "struggled most with Jeopardy's fill-in-the-blank questions , which require one to correctly consider the text before and after the requested answer." What else is Watson capable of? Scientists are hopeful it could help make many fields more efficient — particularly healthcare, which is the "most immediate priority," says USA Today . Watson could help doctors searching for a diagnosis by easily "sifting through mountains of data in mere seconds." "We really believe — I don't want to be overly dramatic — but we could save lives with this," says an IBM senior vice president .

Question: What was the name of the computer that faced off against Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter last week on Jeopardy!?
Answer: Watson